Box Nine

by Jack O'Connell

  His mouth opens, then at once snaps closed, all jaw, alligatorlike. His head takes over with a jerking, too-fast nod and she loves it. It’s just the effect she was going for.

  “We’re going to need some music,” she says, and turns to the desk area. Woo makes a throat-clearing sound that she ignores. She likes being almost naked in this place. She likes the idea of the huge, open space and the coldness of the brick. She thinks if she lived here, it’d be an effort to throw on clothes and leave each morning.

  She fingers the toggle switches at the bottom of the reel-to-reel machine and says, “Let’s see what the doctor likes.” She hits the Play button and the reels start to turn smoothly, at a precise speed, the opposite of Woo’s head. A single, high-pitched electronic tone sounds and she realizes for the first time that she doesn’t know where the speakers are. The tone is followed by silence. She assumes there are probably several speakers, mounted in hidden spots in the study for the best possible acoustics. A guy like Woo would be concerned about sound quality and proper speaker placement.

  “Guess we’ve got a blank tape,” she says, but Woo has stopped nodding and now he just stares up at her, maybe impatient, maybe doubtful, insecure.

  Lenore slides out of the balance of her underwear, tosses them on top of the desk behind her. She comes down on her knees, in front of his feet, relaxes into a sitting position, ass on heels.

  “I’ve always considered getting a tattoo, Freddy. Always wanted one. I’ve debated the question. They’re considered cheap in this country. Biker women. Junkies. Hookers. Every hooker I’ve ever known has had a tattoo. I’m not sure the general public is aware how many tattoos are out there. More than most people would think. But, as you well know, in the Orient it’s a different story. At least for the men. I don’t know what the tattooing standard is for women over there. But with the men it’s considered an art form, right? An enhancement of the skin. And I’ve got to concur. Got to agree with that. I’ve considered placement and for some reason I’m drawn to the erotic areas. I know about the pain involved, but I’m good with pain. No problem there. And, of course, I’ve thought about the design. What would I choose? We can rule out the typical red rose or butterfly right off the bat. I want something unique. Something custom-drawn and more suited to me. And I can’t quite come up with what it should be. So do me a big favor, Freddy, if you would. Give it some thought. Not right now. Don’t say a word right now. But sometime in the future, in the days ahead, give it some thought and tell me what you think would be the best sign for me. Something that would just scream Lenore permanently. From underneath my skin.”

  She sits silent for a few seconds and then rises up on her knees again. She makes him spread his legs apart by slapping his feet. When they’ve opened to their widest stretch, she lies down between them, her belly to the floor, and very slowly, with her eyes locked on his face, she takes him in her mouth. He lets out a high, sucking sound and the question kicks in—Is it possible no one’s ever done this to him before? She sucks very slowly, with gradually increasing pressure, for almost a minute, then she climbs forward on her knees and straddles him, first sitting too high, on his stomach, teasing him, licking his chest.

  “Remember,” she says, “you speak and it’s all over.”

  But it’s not clear whether he hears her or not. He’s letting out these hardly audible whines, his eyes rammed closed. Lenore thinks he sounds something like a miniature dog, quaking near the back door, asking to go out.

  When she thinks it’s been long enough, she moves down, pulls him inside, and starts to ride. She’s wet enough and then, in a minute, much more wet, and they fall into a rhythm that she sets but he responds to beautifully, perfectly, without any instruction, without words or gestures.

  And then a voice barks into the room:

  Ngaatojai

  She jolts upright, sits rigid, but leaves him inside. His eyes spring open and an awful terrified look spreads on his face. He can’t speak. She doubts that even if she commanded him to, his vocal chords would respond. It’s clear he wants to tell her something, but he can’t shake the silence.

  The voice barks out again. The word sounds foreign. The voice has a slightly clipped, mechanical sound to it. And then it hits her what’s happening: the tape. The reel-to-reel machine. The tape she’s turned on has come to life, hit the recorded stretch, only it’s not music. It’s words. Or maybe one word. All in different languages, a long pause between each loud, crisp, elaborated pronunciation.

  “I get it,” she says softly to Woo, trying to be reassuring. “It’s not Teenage Deathcamp, but it’ll do.”

  Slowly, she brings them back into their swaying rhythm.

  Imperio

  His legs come up and cross around her back. They pick up some speed.

  Kuhilani

  He starts to buck slightly underneath with this flawless timing, as if he could feel exactly what was happening inside her and knew how to facilitate the experience, deepen it, elongate it, intensify it.

  Dominante

  He reaches up, eyes closed again, searches with his hands until he finds her breasts. He squeezes, just the right force, positions the nipples between the notches that separate his fingers, pulls, twists, just slightly.

  Vorherrschen

  Lenore’s heart suddenly heaves, gives what feels like an extra, wider pump. In spite of herself she lets out a sound, a nonword, void of attachment to anything physical.

  Przewaga

  She picks up the speed. A new noise starts to issue at the slapping together of her thighs and ass with his pelvis. His legs around her make a new effort, bear inward, hug her like a sweaty and trembling vice.

  Dominio

  Woo starts to breathe out through his nose in harsh short bursts, a dragon from his own childhood nightmares. His head is snapping from left to right, his eyes shut so tight that his forehead shows a plain of creases and folds. He’s biting his lips and pushing air in hard between his gums and inner mouth.

  Cumhachd

  Lenore’s hands slap down onto his chest, palms flat, and she starts pushing off his breastbone like he was some accident victim on the highway. Her toes are curled up to the breaking point. A slick coating of sweat has broken everywhere and streams run down from her neck, over her breasts, over his hands squeezing her breasts, rubbing her nipples. A weird, old Three Stooges-type noise comes out of his mouth. She leans forward, inclines lower and lower over his chest, pumping her hips faster as she moves. Her hands go to the sides of his head, just above his ears, and she grabs two fingerfuls of hair and holds tight, pulling, shaking her own head now side to side.

  Dominari

  He’s the first to let out a yell as he comes, but within seconds she’s joining him. She had hoped to dismount and dress as soon as he was satisfied, but that isn’t an option anymore. She lets her own eyes close, lets the noise pour out of her mouth, meaningless, passionate babble. Her hips buck in a last spastic set of spasms. She comes up as far as she can on her knees and still keep him in, then rams down, draws in air, and falls completely forward onto his chest.

  Time seems to pull into the breakdown lane. Her sense of taste overwhelms her. Everything is salt. Woo stays quiet, but his lungs continue to work overtime. Neither of them attempts to alter their position.

  The light seems a little dimmer to her. She keeps her eyes closed, realizes she’s hugging him around the shoulders. She becomes aware of a sound, a slight, almost inaudible hiss, probably from the hidden speakers.

  She’s too loose to brace herself, though she knows it’s coming, so she waits, willing listener, suddenly submissive.

  And then the bodiless voice says: Dominance.

  Mingo likes this street, tree-lined, middle-class, relatively stable. He rolls the Jaguar at a creeping pace and studies the old houses, all Victorians, many of them painted in bright pastel colors. He finds the architecture amazing, finds it hard to believe there was a time when men would put this much effort and detail into a bui
lding. Just for the sake of the way it looks. “They must have been fanatics,” he mutters, without any explanation to his train of thought.

  Cortez sits next to him, preoccupied, eyes closed, his thumb and index finger rubbing over the bridge of his nose.

  “The first time I came down here, I figured this couldn’t be it. This doesn’t look like a place with stores, you know …” Mingo says.

  “Commercially zoned,” Cortez tries, without opening his eyes.

  “Exactly. This looks …”

  “Residential.”

  “There you go. First time out, I figured you’d given me the wrong directions. Then I practically broke my back carrying all those boxes up there.”

  “A little suffering is good for the soul, Mingo.”

  Mingo raises his eyebrows, picks up a little speed, until Cortez says, “Okay, pull over and wait here.”

  He gets out of the Jaguar and stands on the sidewalk looking up at the building. A pastel-yellow Victorian. Turrets, cupola, odd angles and jogs everywhere. There’s a carved wooden sign hanging over the archway that leads up onto a wraparound porch. It reads “Ephraim Beck’s Mystery Bookshop.” Simple, Cortez thinks, tasteful. He walks up onto the porch where a long redwood picnic table holds a row of seven old-fashioned orange crates. The crates are all packed to capacity with paperback books. A small sign, propped on a tiny antique-looking easel, reads “Any three for a dollar.”

  He looks back down to the street and sees Mingo behind the driver’s wheel, in a world of his own, talking to himself. He thinks to himself, Everyone I draw around myself is defective in some way, then moves inside the shop.

  A bell rings as he pushes open the storm door and steps into the foyer. It’s warm inside. The lighting is soft, but bright enough for long-term browsing. He stands in one spot and does a full scan. He loves what he sees. The place is so different from Hotel Penumbra, evokes a different era. Different concerns, importance placed on different priorities.

  In the front room off the foyer, a middle-aged man is sound asleep on a small couch covered with a paisley quilt. He has salt-and-pepper hair, clipped grey mustache, wire-rim glasses pushed up onto the crown of his head. He’s dressed as if he’s playing the part of the kindly, old bookseller at the community theater. A white cotton button-down shirt covered by a brown, unbuttoned cardigan sweater. Suspenders barely visible. Corduroy pants. Penny loafers over heavy argyle socks.

  He looks to be in an uncomfortable position, neither sitting nor lying down, but an unusual blend of the two. His head is cocked backward on the back edge of the couch, his face pointed up to the tin-plated ceiling. His mouth is open slightly. His hands are gripping a book spread open in his lap. Cortez would like to read the title without waking the man.

  Instead, he takes a step to an elaborate walnut bookcase with a sign resting on top that reads “New Arrivals.” He starts to reach out to pull down Harry Keeler’s The Book with the Orange Leaves, but stops himself and simply looks. He feels uneasy, like the confused kin of a young mother who’s given her infant up for adoption, and now returns to his school yard to simply stare at what was once hers. He turns away from the bookcase, annoyed with himself for the dramatics, ashamed of the conceit of this idea. But he can’t help one last thought—I’m not much more than the fictions I’ve sold.

  The entrance bell did nothing to disturb the sleeping man and Cortez is unsure whether to ignore him and begin browsing or to try to wake him gently and announce his presence. Then the thought hits him that it’s possible the man is dead, a heart attack in the middle of the book’s climax, maybe a murder scene or a chase.

  Cortez leans forward slightly without taking a step. He wants a sign of breathing. The chest to rise. The eyes to flutter.

  But there’s nothing. He has to confirm the worst. He begins to move toward the couch and the man’s mouth opens and says, “You’re a first-timer.”

  Cortez stops and instinctively squelches any show of surprise. The man hasn’t moved his head or opened his eyes. Cortez finds this rude. Especially to a potential customer. The guy obviously has no business skill. It’s amazing the place has stayed in operation so long.

  “Excuse me?”

  Now the head comes up and the body straightens itself into a normal sitting posture.

  “Ephraim Beck,” he says, extending a hand that Cortez walks toward and shakes. “I doze sometimes. When it’s slow. I find it very refreshing.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What I said was, this is your first visit to the store. Most of the customers here are regulars. That’s the way it is with specialty stores, you know.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “You from out of town?”

  “Here on business.”

  “Saw the ad in the yellow pages?”

  “Actually, I asked the desk clerk at the hotel for some of the better bookstores in the city.”

  “I see. Are you a collector?”

  “Really, a beginner. An amateur.”

  “We’ve got something for everyone. Any author you’re especially interested in? You look like you might be a Chesterton man. Am I right?”

  “To be honest, I’m going to be doing a great deal of traveling in the near future. A lot of time on planes. Trains. I’m looking for some tides that will keep my interest. But at the same time I don’t want to load myself down.”

  The man squints his eyes a little and makes a noise, sucking air through his clenched teeth. His manner suggests he’s weighing a difficult decision. Finally, he shrugs and says, “I think you’re going to want to go with paperbacks.”

  “Paperbacks,” Cortez repeats.

  The man nods. “I know, I know. It’s like you can feel the decay in your hands as you’re reading the first line. But you’ve got limited luggage capacity, correct? And if you’re going to be on the road for any length of time … Let’s just say you stuff a first-edition Chesterton down into the Samsonite before you turn it over to the airline people. Come the end of your trip, I don’t want to look. I mean, it’s a question of respect.”

  Cortez decides this is the kind of man who could wander off into endless oblique stories with no apparent meaning. He says, “Do you have any Hammett?”

  The man takes a breath and smiles indulgently, as if to say, please, think about your questions before you ask them.

  “Okay, how about the obvious choice?”

  “That’s not so obvious to me.”

  Cortez nods. “Sorry. Maltese Falcon. Any paperback edition.”

  “I’ve got one by Vintage. Two ninety-five, plus tax. Good-sized print.”

  “Sold.”

  Mr. Beck smiles and starts to move for a wall of paperbacks toward the rear of the store. He throws his voice back over his shoulder as Cortez follows. “Now we’re moving. What else can we get? You said it would be a long trip.”

  “Yes, but now that I think about it, that one tide should do it. There’ll be some books waiting for me at my first stop.”

  The clerk stops at a shelf, runs a finger parallel to the books’ spines without touching them, stops, and pulls down a black-covered book with green lettering and a picture of the famous bird sitting like an Egyptian sphinx.

  He turns back toward Cortez and presents it. “First published in ’30. Still tremendously popular today.”

  “I’ve read it before.”

  “I would think so,” the man says, and then seems to regret it.

  Cortez lets him off the hook and says, “There’s a part of this book that gets to me. One particular scene. A small bit. You know what I’m talking about?”

  The man smiles as if they’d just become conspirators. As if they’d sealed some kind of mutually beneficial agreement.

  “You know the scene? With Spade and Bridget O’Shaughnessy? At Spade’s place?”

  “The story of Flitcraft,” the man says.

  “Exactly,” Cortez says. “I knew you’d know.”

  The man’s head slopes to the side a
little. His lips stay together.

  “I’ve always wondered what other people thought about that.”

  When the man realizes that Cortez is waiting for a response, he says simply, “Of course.”

  “Why do you think that scene is in there?”

  The man lets his head roll slightly. His tongue slides out of his mouth and wets his lips. “It’s a great story,” he says.

  They stare at each other for a few seconds, then Cortez reaches into his pocket and pulls out a roll of bills. Without looking, he fans them slightly, lets his fingers run through the fan, in decreasing denomination, until he stops and yanks loose a five. He hands it to Beck and says, “Keep the change.”

  Ike has left the clock radio on and now, as he sleeps, the talk-show host warns the public about the dangerous epidemic of skinheads, racist teenage males who shave their scalps and engage in hideous violence in our urban cesspools. These skinheads, according to the talk-show host, are one of the greatest dangers facing our society today, a horrible blight on the landscape of freedom and truth, a perversion of all the values that America has fought and died for in bloody wars on foreign shores. They are monsters, beasts, scum of the earth, and must be dealt with as such.

  HOST: Thank you for waiting, you’re on WQSG, tell the city what’s on your mind.

  CALLER: Ray? Hello? Ray?

  HOST: Yes, ma’am, you’re on the air.

  CALLER: Hello? I don’t … Hello?

  HOST: Go ahead, dear, we don’t have all night. You’re on the air.

  CALLER: Oh yes, thank you, love the show, listen all the time.

  HOST: Thank you. Your question, please.

  CALLER: Yes, well, I was wondering, this skinhead problem, this problem you’ve been discussing, I was wondering, is this an inherited problem, what you would call a genetic problem, because my husband’s brother—oh, I was going to say his name, but never mind, he has no hair, he lost all his hair, all at once, just gone, not even any left around the ears, like, you see. Now, they called that, the doctor he went to called that alopecia, and his hair never came back, but he was always the same man we’ve known, wonderful man, nothing like these people you’ve described, he had none of these side effects …